The song has remained popular, especially in India. An abridged version is sung and played frequently as a patriotic song and as a marching song of the Indian Armed Forces. A satirical version of the same from a 1958 Hindi movie also remains popular.[3]

Iqbal was a lecturer at the Government College, Lahore at that time, and was invited by a student Lala Har Dayal to preside over a function. Instead of delivering a speech, Iqbal sang "Saare Jahan Se Achcha". The song, in addition to embodying yearning and attachment to the land of Hindustan, expressed "cultural memory" and had an elegiac quality. In 1905, the 27-year-old Iqbal viewed the future society of the subcontinent as both a pluralistic and composite Hindu-Muslim culture. Later that year he left for Europe for a three-year sojourn that was to transform him into an Islamic philosopher and a visionary of a future Islamic society.[2]

In 1910, Iqbal wrote another song for children, "Tarana-e-Milli" (Anthem of the Religious Community), which was composed in the same metre and rhyme scheme as "Saare Jahan Se Achcha", but which renounced much of the sentiment of the earlier song.[4] The sixth stanza of "Saare Jahan Se Achcha" (1904), which is often quoted as proof of Iqbal's secular outlook:

Central Asia[5] and Arabia are ours, Hindustan is ours
We are Muslims, the whole world is our homeland.[4]

Iqbal's world view had now changed; it had become both global and Islamic. Instead of singing of Hindustan, "our homeland," the new song proclaimed that "our homeland is the whole world."[6] Two decades later, in his presidential address to the Muslim League annual conference in Allahabad in 1930, he supported a separate nation-state in the Muslim majority areas of the sub-continent, an idea that inspired the creation of Pakistan.[7]

Saare Jahan Se Achcha has remained popular in India for nearly a century. Mahatma Gandhi is said to have sung it over a hundred times when he was imprisoned at Yerawada Jail in Pune in the 1930s.[10]

In the 1930s and 1940s, it was sung to a slower tune. In 1945, while working in Mumbai with IPTA (Indian Peoples Theater Association), the sitarist Pandit Ravi Shankar was asked to compose the music for the K.A. Abbas movie Dharti ka Laal and the Chetan Anand movie Neecha Nagar. During this time, Ravi Shankar was asked to compose music for the song Saare jahan se accha. In an interview in 2009 with Shekhar Gupta, Ravi Shankar recounts that he felt that the existing tune was too slow and sad. To give it a more inspiring impact, he set it to a stronger tune which is today the popular tune of this song, which they then tried out as a group song.[11] It was later recorded by the singer Lata Mangeshkar to an 3rd altogether different tune. Stanzas (1), (3), (4), and (6) of the song became an unofficial national song in India,[1] and the Ravi Shankar version was adopted as the official quick march of the Indian Armed Forces.[12]

In his inaugural speech, the former prime minister of India Manmohan Singh quoted this poem at his first press conference after becoming the Prime Minister.[14]

The song is popular in India in schools, and as a marching song for the Indian armed forces (played during public events and parades including those for the Indian independence day, republic day and Beating the Retreat).[2]

A parody of the song was written by the Urdu poet Sahir Ludhianvi for the 1958 Hindi film Phir Subah Hogi and sung by Mukesh. With the title "Cheeno arab hamara", the song drew the irony between the reality of life for the common and poor people, with the idealized context drawn in the original song.[3]

^"'Taranah-e Hindi' (1904) was explicitly written as a patriotic song for children; Iqbal also composed a number of others meant for children, but this one has always been the most popular. This little ghazal, composed by the man widely considered to be the philosophical father of Pakistan, is now extremely popular—but only in India."[1]

^Although "Chin" refers to China in modern Urdu, in Iqbal's day it referred to Central Asia, coextensive with historical Turkestan. See also, Iqbal: Tarana-e-Milli, 1910. Columbia University, Department of South Asian Studies.

^ ab"Here they are to be pronounced not Hindūstāṉ and gu-lis-tāṉ, respectively, as usual, but Hindositāṉ and gul-si-tāṉ, respectively, to suit the meter." From: Pritchett, F. 2004. "Taraanah-i-Hindii" Columbia University, Department of South Asian Studies.